Familypedia talk:Bot policy
''(If we have no trouble with bots we may avoid building up the complex procedures needed by Wikipedia!) '' This is precisely the cool thing about bots. You don't have to get creepy with folks discussing wierd librarian rules. While they are crucial to manage the complexity of millions of articles, I'm the first to admit they sound pretty anal retentive to novices. The majority of folks blow through wikis like sagebrush and so the noise can be kept to a minimum. Then you run the bot and make everything tidy. The main thing is to understand that some stuff is really really hard to fix with bots. So we need to lean on folks about those. Like putting in info on images. I went through a dozen uncat'd images and some had zero text. But bots can be run to post friendly reminders on the contributor's accounts. -Phlox- (formerly Mak) 16:39, 7 September 2007 (UTC) Info bot Hello Robin, Richard and I discussed the possibility to start with a person page and then use a bot to make a new info page direct from the personpage, that immediate automatic has the surname, given name, full name, years of birth and death at the right place. Richard thought that it was not allowed, without permission of central wikia to make such bot. Do you know if this is allowed ? Fred Bergman 14:22, 28 April 2009 (UTC) :No need to consult Central. :User:Phlox said he was planning to do something like that. You could do what he could do. :You are, of course, proposing to take the data from the page name, not from the personpage text. And presumably to add the person article template to the article, in the same operation. :I see very little advantage in using such a bot except for our 15,000 or so existing pages that have no info pages, because all of that data (except the death year) is fairly easy to drag and drop from the info page name, when one is following the recommended procedure for new person pages (i.e. starting with the info page). :I can see how it would get the years right (maybe even the qualified years), but it would have trouble splitting up the name. I guess that, if it has a good try using the "standard" English model, the person who finishes the info page will be able to copy and/or paste easily to fix any irregular cases with patronyms and nicknames and titles. :If it works, it will create many thousands of new info pages with very little info and needing to be found by somebody and worked on. That extra search time might negate the value of the bot, because of the drag-and-drop efficiency I mentioned above. But there could be ways of minimising the search-and-open time, e.g. by putting all such pages in a temporary category, from which another bot could find and open batches on request, perhaps selecting by surname so that those of us whose tradition is all-English can avoid surnames that we know will have complications! :Have a go! (32.000 ... 47.000 ... +++) :Past my bedtime. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:09, 28 April 2009 (UTC)